And in this moral mud there bred apace bestiality and cruelty, superstition and sensuality, tyranny and fear--the black brood of man's inhumanity to man.
Archibald Henry Grimké
The Public Record
Archibald Henry Grimké was an African-American lawyer, intellectual, journalist, diplomat and community leader in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He graduated from freedmen's schools, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School, and served as American Consul to the Dominican Republic from 1894 to 1898. He was an activist for the rights of Black Americans, working in Boston and Washington, D.C. He was a national vice-president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as president of its Washington, D.C. chapter.
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Love was in their mouths and love was in their hearts.
During those dark years the blacks were much more sinned against than sinning.
Under it we have the double moral standard and the double legal standard operating throughout that section with a vengeance.
I would not take the word of a Southern Court on this point.
Is it any wonder that crime emerges out of such cruel and unequal conditions?
But ignorance is a breeder of crime just as poverty is.
It would reappear as Negro serfdom unless placed in the way of utter extinction.
This sounds singular in this land of the free and it is singular, for of no other class of American labor could it be said that its right to migrate from one state to another is actually obstructed by law and would be resisted by force.
The South does not regard the Negro laborer then as undesirable but quite the contrary--only it wants to retain possession of it on its own terms, not on those advantageous to that labor.
I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.